Daddy Long Legs (1955)

Directed by Jean Negulesco. Starring Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Fred Clark, Terry Moore, Thelma Ritter, Larry Keating, Charlotte Austin, Kelly Brown.

Caron-co-starring musical romance in the 1950s tradition of Caron-co-starring musical romances where she’s cast as an unseemly love interest. In this case, she’s an 18-year-old orphan girl “adopted” by a much-older wealthy benefactor (Astaire) and sent to college on his dime (she even ends up rooming with his niece), and, yes, she and her “Daddy Long Legs” later fall in love with each other. The nickname is earned because of the way her new “papa”’s silhouette is described—she has no idea who he is, giving Astaire opportunities to relentlessly trick the young woman and eventually be forgiven—but needless to say, the icky situation is made no more savory by the repeated utterance of that nom de plume. Even if all that unsavory business is ignored (pretend Astaire is at least twenty years younger, and it’s misunderstandings instead of deceit that obscures his identity for so long), one is still left with a pretty drab genre effort with very little of the star’s signature footwork to restore delight to bored patrons now and again. The songs are disposable, the comic situations are uninspired, and the lengthy “daydream sequence” drags like an anchor—if this kind of extended showcase didn’t even work well in Singin’ in the Rain, why did anyone think it would work anywhere else? Not even Thelma Ritter, cast in the “Thelma Ritter role” (with only a fraction of the cynical bite), can breathe life into this dud. Previously a novel and play by Jean Webster dating back to the 1910s.

36/100